Chapter 23

“You’ve got an invalid haircut.
And it hurts when you smile.
You better get out of town,
before your nickname expires.
It’s the Kingdom of the Spiders.
It’s the Empire of the Ants.
You need a permit to walk around downtown,
you need a license to dance.”
-Warren Zevon, “Life’ll Kill Ya“
Contessa Helena de San Finzione bid her oldest and newest friends in the world goodbye at the hotel. She and Mander returned to the La Contessa suite.

Helen had made it easy enough for Whyte to locate her. That morning, before Julie and Susan had arrived, she informed Twitter that her faith in her guards and the Seattle Hotel de Società Finzione was so great, that she would continue to stay in the La Contessa suite tonight and while in Seattle. They passed through the entrance hall, the Ultimados flanking the door to the suite saluting her. The broken doors had been removed from the hallway, and workers would be coming in the morning to take care of the damage. More Ultimados stood guard on the now-exposed fire exits.

Helen entered the main room of the suite, walked over to the mini-bar, and got out two little bottles of Jack Daniels. She tossed one to Mander and opened the other.

“I’ve not seen Your Countessness do much drinking.” Mander told her, opening his.

“This is something different.” She told him, with a swig from her bottle. “One before going into battle.”

Mander nodded and did the same with his bottle. Helen reached back into the minibar and got a Coke to go with hers. She offered Mander one as well.

“No thanks, Your Countessness.” He told her. “Wouldn’t want you racking up those minibar charges.”

Helen smiled at that and tossed him one anyway.

“Minibar charges are, like, the easiest thing in the world to dispute. All you have to do is say ‘I didn’t even open that thing. One of the maids must have... ‘ and it’s one of those things where YOU know you’re lying, WE know you’re lying, and you KNOW we know you’re lying; but at the same time, this COULD be that one time in a thousand where we have to do a shakedown in Housekeeping to unmask the criminal genius who decided to help herself to a fucking Toblerone on your dime. Probably because you or the asshole in the room before were such a dick or a creep to her that she just needed a little something to calm down. Some places, the accusation alone would get her fired; and the piece-of-shit loses nothing if he decides to push the lie to the point of costing a maid her job. The checkout clerk already knows all of this, and that you’ve probably got a flight to catch, which you’ll blame us if you miss; and we just want your ass out of our hotel now, so, it’ll just save everyone a lot of hassle if he swallows every natural human instinct to scream ‘YOU ARE A FUCKING LIAR AND WE BOTH KNOW IT’ to your face, says, ‘my mistake, sir,’ and hits delete. And yes, because accidents DO happen, we’d have to give him the benefit of the doubt; so, a complete dickhead could pull that shit a second time before we’d red-flag him as a scammer at all Società Finzione establishments and venues. Besides, I know the owner, she’ll cover it.”

She turned on the news, and she and Mander both started laughing at the frozen image of her with her crotch digitized out and the words “Helen’s Gate-Gate” under it. They flipped through several channels, watching liberal news praise her bold, empowering choices; then watching conservative news condemn her for daring to go out in public, knowing full well that she had one of those things between her legs.

“So,” Mander asked, finishing his drink. “Ya do this a lot? Like every time one of them yobbos gets a pic of ya sunbathin’ with yer Bristols out...”

Helen lit her cigarette before replying.

“There’s some other story that I need to make go away, exactly.”

“So, when they get a naughty vid, does ‘at mean ya’ve done somethin’ like nuked Ottawa?”

“Sometimes, when I’m really pissed off at Julie, I’ll threaten Troy that San Finzione’s going to get The Bomb, but that’s as close as it comes to us having nukes. No, leaking a sex tape is an extreme last resort, and everyone involved has to be on board. The video of Rita and I would have killed Whyte’s story, but it would have taken Rita’s career with it. The progress that Vincenzo made, and I still strive for aside, Mander, San Finzione is still a Catholic nation.”

Mander raised a hand. She nodded and gave him a smile that let him know it wasn’t required.

“Your Countessness, though, is in the news with blokes and birds all the time.”

“I’m the wealthy young widow of a great and respected man, whose shoes only one other man on this planet could ever be worthy of filling, and he’s always belonged to Julie. Because of that, I’ve sworn to never marry again. So, I’m allowed to be ‘eccentric’ and expected to ‘have my little dalliances’ with the Hollywood Pretty-Boy-or-Girl of the Moment who couldn’t find San Finzione on a map in a castle with a gift shop where they sell maps of San Finzione and have some very helpful staff, who’ll help you find just the right map for your needs. If La Contessa is seen with another woman, ‘That’s our Contessa!’ But if Rita is seen with another woman, there’ll be a bunch of people that I’ll have to do The Thing to so that she can retain any semblance of her previous life. And as much as I hate to admit it; yes, dammit, Troilus, some of your lessons did stick!”

“Well, keep doin’ what yer doin’.” Mander said, cracking open the Coke. “Cause it’s a better job than this lot here.”

He gestured at the man on the TV, whose show was usually devoted to screaming about how the government is going to take everyone’s guns any moment now, but had changed his tune today, and was now screaming about how government irresponsibility in not regulating vaginas more strongly was going to let the terrorists win.

The parts they laughed at most while flipping through channels was where the reporters and talking heads whose regular discussions had been put on hold for this “breaking story” stumbled to find ways to talk about her vagina without actually USING the word, or any of the common terms for it. Grown adults, some of whom had seen one up close before, sitting around a table at eleven o’clock at night, attempting to rapidly invent euphemisms as if there were a toddler in the room who would immediately pick up and start shouting any seemingly-attention-getting word they used; however offensive or vulgar, yet to-the-point it might be.

“What am I supposed to tell my children?” A woman on the screen asked the rest of the panel.

“Ya tell ‘em to look down!” Mander shouted back at her. “An’ whatever they see, they got their whole lives to sort it out.” They laughed, then Mander changed his tone. “Whyte’s comin’ any time now.”

Helen stopped laughing and nodded. She pressed a code on the large remote control that controlled most things in the suite, causing steel shutters to drop over all of the windows. She picked up her phone to look at the time. Julie and Susan might have made it home by now.

And saw that she had no signal.

Hey, Susan again. Rob and Eric had just stopped on the street in front of our houses before turning into their driveway. Julie jumped out as soon as the car was going slow enough and ran toward our house. I stayed in the car until it was stopped.

Troy was standing in the doorway. Julie ran up to him and didn’t even let him get the “Hey” out before she threw her arms around him and began kissing him. Helen was right about the internal screaming.

Seeing him in the doorway, my mind kept going back to that twisted door in the hall outside Helen’s suite. Something kept bothering me about it.

“Is Capitan Ortega available?” I asked Rob and Eric, getting out of their car.

“He will be in the command center in the garage.” Eric said. “Go in through the house, please.”

I nodded and thanked him. For being unstoppable killing machines, Ultimados are surprisingly polite.

I entered the house and made my way through the cots that had been set up in the living room to the garage. The scene inside was, indeed, what I would expect from the term “command center.” The overhead light was off, but there was enough light to see by from the computer terminals and other military hardware that Julie could probably tell you what it is, but I couldn’t. Four of the Ultimados were manning terminals. Capitan Gregorio Ortega, their commanding officer, seemed to pace around a black, shiny table in the center of the room. I looked at it in hope that it would turn out to be some kind of 3-D holographic map that hovers over the table, but if it was, it wasn’t turned on just then.

“Señorita Bailey.” He said, turning and noticing me. He didn’t salute. Nor did he have to. I’m just as much a civilian in San Finzione as I am in America. “Everything is well across the street?”

“Yeah,” I said, still a bit distracted by all the high-tech stuff. I’d heard Troy and Julie came over last night, when they were worried about Helen. I got caught up in wondering how the hell Julie ever got him out of this garage, then remembered why I’d come over. “Everything’s fine there. I had a question, though. You know that video of the incident at the hotel yesterday that doesn’t exist, and if it did, every copy has been accidentally destroyed?”

“Si?” Ortega replied.

“May I watch it?”

“Si. You are now cleared.” Ortega said, going over to an empty computer and pulling the seat out for me. I thanked him, figuring it was a reflex from working for Helen. He opened the file and hit play. Apparently, Helen’s “top secret clearance” spell last night worked.

I watched the footage. Me accepting that I’m not gonna pull some Matrix shit in this scene, Mander giving me an understanding nod that said “Yeah, this is gonna get serious, Susan. You go to Rita, we got this,” Velazquez pulling some Matrix shit in this scene. And then the explosions at either end of the hall. The fire doors flying off the opposite walls, twisted things on the ground now.

“You’ve got guards watching those doorways now, I’m guessing.”

“Si.” Ortega responded.

The question that had been digging at the back of my head finally poked itself forward.

“So, where did those other guys come from?” I asked Ortega. “Velazquez, Mander, and I saw the six guys get in the elevator, and they shot those six guys. So where’d the guys on the fire exits come from? Did they run up the 51 floors to the La Contessa Suite? I’m sure Helen has cameras on the helipad. Somebody would’ve noticed another helicopter landing on the roof before Ernst. Even if it just hovered for a moment and they slid down on ropes like you guys do, there’d be camera footage of that. And then they’d have had to get into the stairwells. But the rooftop fire doors were intact, your guys had to blow those open themselves...”

I spun around and looked Ortega in the eye.

“I know where Whyte is!” I said, fishing for my phone. “And he’s about to attack Helen!”

I dialed her number as he shouted commands at the others in Spanish and they went scrambling into action.

“You’ve got extra Ultimados in the hallways tonight, covering those now-breached fire exits. Where did you pull them from?”

“The balconies.” Ortega replied. “La Contessa has the steel shutters on the windows.”

“Then that’s where he’s coming from! Whyte’s been all about misdirection from the beginning! He had them blow the doors off, so you’d focus your attention on the hallway. The Triad hit was never meant to succeed. The real attack is tonight, and probably coming from the now-deprioritized balconies! And there’s only one place he’d hide: A place so stupid, that Helen would never think to look there.”